The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

by Jeremy Dronfield

A summer sun lay hot and lazy on the slow-moving surface of the Danube Canal. The faint, delighted squeals of children drifted over the water from the grassy banks where families sat with picnics or strolled under the trees. Pleasure boats cruised and row boats scudded across the expanse between them. It was all far away from Tini’s senses as she pulled on the oars—a pleasant, distant background music of laughter. Sunlight sparkled on the splashes with each lift of the oar blades from the water, illuminating the faces of her children. Edith, smiling serenely, Fritz and Herta still little kids, and Kurt, the last-born and beloved, a tiny speck scarcely out of diapers. Tini smiled and heaved at the oars, sending the boat surging across the water.39 She was a good rower—had been since her girlhood. And she doted on her family; at the age of twelve she had been made a counselor to the younger schoolchildren because she loved it so much; to nurture and succor was part of her makeup, and in motherhood it had its purest expression. The sounds of the other boats and the revels on the far banks faded, as if a mist had descended, closing off the boat from the world. The oars dipped and splashed, and the boat glided on. In a drawer in a chest in faraway Massachusetts, Tini’s last letters to Kurt lay gathered. The German in which they were written was already leaking away from his comprehension as his child’s mind adapted to his new world. He had absorbed her meaning, but was already ...